I was working on one of my blogs and noticed in search console that the website load times in search console were very poor. I’d been adding lots of great content but some of it just wasn’t being indexed. Yes it was a new site but usually a week after submitted to Google unique content can be found within the index. I suspect the very poor response times from a US IP address was the issue. UK server response times were respectable between 200-400ms but from the west coast of the US there were not! On average we were looking at a 1.4s page download time within search console.
Running tests to measure the entire page load using pingdom also put the site at around 5 seconds. Which isn’t terrible but it can certainly be a lot better.
So I decided to make a move to a new server, run by Digital Ocean.
If you have not heard of digital ocean, then in a nut shell they’re a startup and small business focussed cloud hosting company. They have very solid tech, for instance they were the first cloud host to provide SSD’s across their infrastructure and in all are very simple to use.
Instead of directly install on a digital ocean server I opted to use a managed solution through cloudways. Essentially giving me some modifications & support if needed. Digital ocean do have a one click WordPress app so it’s not really necessary, but I’ve been happy with them so far.
Results speak for themselves over a 300% page speed increase. Google crawling more pages and downloading far more content.